Pea Pod and Hello Fresh are returning to the practice of delivering fresh food to your door. As far back as the early 1900s, dairy products, doughnuts and vegetables had daily home delivery or, at the very least, a vendor with a bike or horse and a cart selling their goods from the street. You could even get potato chips delivered to your door.

If you remember the advertising phrase, “Oh, Mom! here comes the Omar Man,” then you remember the aroma of freshly baked goods delivered to your home.

William Coad of Nebraska owned the Omaha Flour Mills which made Omar Flour. When Coad sold the mill, he purchased the City Baking Co. of Indianapolis and the Donaldson Baking Co. of Columbus, Ohio, in 1927 and renamed the company Omar Bakeries. The name was from a poem by Persian astronomer and poet, Omar Khayyam, who penned, “Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou.”

William Elwarner, who was associated with City Baking Co. and Grocer’s Baking Co., constructed a building for Omar Bakeries in 1915. It was originally named Elwarner Flats and featured a ground-floor retail space rented to a grocer, a downstairs laundry and upstairs apartments. When a fire destroyed the Grocers Baking Co., those operations also were moved to the building at East 16th Street and Bellefontaine Avenue. The building still stands, but it's set to be demolished as part of a residential development by CalAtlantic Homes of Indiana.

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The structure at 16th Street and Bellefontaine Avenue in Indianapolis, which once housed Omar Bakery, seen Thursday, Feb. 15, 2018. The building will soon be demolished. (Photo: Jenna Watson/IndyStar)

Omar competed with several other bakeries in Indianapolis for home delivery. Omar’s advertising campaigns of slick full or half-page advertisements that showed the wholesomeness of its products and the clean-cut “Omar Man” brought in the customers.

Freshness was the key and “Direct from Our Ovens to Your Home,” was emblazoned on the delivery trucks. In the 1930s, Omar Bakeries had a policy that all goods on the trucks which remained unsold at the end of the day were sold at a reduced price at their “returned-goods” store.

In the 1940s, the Omar Man also distributed the "Omar Super Book of Comics," but only if you were a member of the Omar Junior Comic Book Club. Bread and comics — what more could a kid ask for?

By the mid-1950s, Omar had more than 280 route men from 12 distribution points throughout the state and 91 in Indianapolis. Omar turned out 525,000 loaves of 17 varieties of bread each week and 48 varieties of cakes, rolls, pies, doughnuts and specialty pastries.

Continental Baking Co. acquired Omar Bakeries in 1958, then sold four of the bakeries five years later. Omar Bakeries suspended operations at the Indianapolis plant on Feb. 4, 1966, moving operations to the company’s Columbus, Ohio, plant. Deliveries in Indianapolis were suspended a year later.

No longer would local children hear the cry of, “Oh, Mom! Here Comes the Omar Man” — or the popular jingle, which had run on TV and radio stations across the city from the Mary Baker program on WIRE in the 1930s to Bill Crawford’s WFBM nightly weather show on WFBM-TV Channel 6 in the '50s.